Authors: Melanie Rae Thon
I slipped, I almost fell, bedazzled by the thought, as if hearing God’s Word, the seed in my heart, rupture for the first time. Mother came, light as light. She caught my arm. She laughed. She said,
Forty-four years old, and still you’d fall on your face without me.
Yes, forty-four and so tired, and too weak to walk seven blocks, and fumbling in my body without you.
I was glad to see the green-eyed girl at the pool. She restored me. Her beauty seemed simple today, almost clear, not hers, merely the glass for God’s reflection. I knew her name now, Helen Kinderman. Sweetly she’d given it to me last week when I asked her. She spoke softly, strangely shy, like a child; and though she stood five inches taller than i, though she glowed, blond and pale, a Nordic queen, she looked suddenly small and bewildered.
I loved her for this, the absence of all arrogance.
Today, everyone looked perfect. One leg, one breast—no fat, no hair—what did it matter? Carl Ancelet pulled hard with his left arm to compensate, and his right leg, his one extraordinary leg, kicked up and down and side to side, as he glided down the pool. A dark-skinned woman swam on her back, pregnant and joyful, frighteningly lush, buoyantly healthy, pink suit clinging to swollen nipples and navel, tight pink cloth exposing her, leaving her more naked.
Louise Doren appeared with two bald women, ones whose hair had fallen out in the grip of chemotherapy, ones healing now with her, their guide, their hope, because she had lost a breast at thirty-three and was not afraid, because she gave them a vision of how they might reclaim their strength in water—Louise, still alive at thirty-seven, and now her hair grew long and wavy, pale blond, shot with silver.
A tall boy with rippled muscles, one who’d shaved himself on purpose, stroked his smooth head, suddenly ashamed of this indulgence.
We were whole, each one of us, and all of us together.
I remembered my father’s blessings: for lightning and thunder, for the beautiful ones, a narrow road through red maples, green dragonflies and white tulips, for lovely girls and strange-looking creatures:
Baruch ata Adonai Eloheinu Melech ha’olam mishaneh hab’riyot.
Blesséd are You, Adonai our God, Ruler of the Universe, who makes the creatures different.
Kristina Everly spoke to her deaf twins from across the pool, hands leaping in light, voice blessedly silent. How lucky they were to speak this way! I watched Ricky and Ryan dive deep to tell secrets underwater. Idris emerged from the tunnel of the dressing room, white towel wrapped like a skirt around him. One day after my mother’s first stroke and before her second, Idris gave me a tiny cup of espresso at his coffee shop—warm and delicious it was, bitter and sweet as melted chocolate. I told him I would never need anything again, and he nodded; he understood; he believed me.
But come back
, he said.
Free for you, anytime, really.
I didn’t come. I was afraid of him, his beauty and his kindness, the way he said my name,
Margalit
, so lightly, as if it were not my name at all, but the word for his favorite dance,
the Margalit
, and as he spoke, he spun me—
yes
, Margalit whirled with Idris, a sleek Persian man as perfect as Helen Kinderman, elegant and smooth skinned, but her complete opposite: dark where she was bright, hair black, skin olive. We met only at the pool—he seemed to know why—but I was always glad on days like today when Idris chose the lane beside me.
Two more appeared, the last to join us, Samuel Killian pushing his wife, violette, in her wheelchair. I loved to see him: stooped old man, thin skin speckled with dark bruises— dear, faithful husband, delicate and determined, every knot of his sternum visible. Fragile as he might seem, Samuel had the will to wheel his tiny, white-haired wife to the edge of the pool, lift her out of the chair, and ease her down to the water.
I thought what a blessing it was to swim with them, what a gift that they would allow it.
My father taught me to swim before I learned to say
no
, before I knew fear in any language. He could teach anybody to swim: little girls crippled by polio, soldiers with stumps instead of legs, old women terrified of water. My father said:
Why be afraid of the thing that holds us?
My father said:
I’m right here; I’ll walk in the water beside you.
When Helen swam below me today, I found her foolish and splendid, extravagant in her strength, but not vain, not driven. I loved her blond ponytail, long as a mermaid’s hair flowing. When she slowed, when she lay still on the bottom, I thought: some new challenge, some watery meditation, the mind making the body heavy so that she could stay down without a flutter, as if floating. It made no sense, floating twelve feet under,
floating on the bottom
, but this is what I saw, and in my mind how I said it.
I confess: I grew vaguely irritated. She stayed too close to the edge. Despite her depth, she distracted me, and so I blamed her when I missed my flip turn. I forgot how lucky I was, how privileged to swim with these people. I forgot about coconuts and pears and olives, all the fruit at home, waiting to be cracked and sliced, the endless gifts waiting to be opened. I forgot about God as wine and swallowed a mouthful of water. He left me sputtering, separate from all things, trapped in myself, pitifully human.
My awe for the girl grew hard, a pit of shame sharp in my belly.
I swam over her three times before I thought to go down, before I felt her as I’d felt the birds, before my mother said,
She needs you.
A trick, I thought, this voice in water. I did not believe. I did not trust her.
Dive
, she said, and I obeyed, but the breath I took was quick and shallow. I had to rise again and gasp, and dive again to reach her. I thought I’d find Helen, green eyes open, that we would speak in sign, in bliss, that there would be no struggle.
But I touched her arm and I knew; I knew then already.
Limp, the girl, water-logged, heavy, no breath in the lungs and so she floated on the bottom. I took Helen Kinderman in my arms; I wrapped my arms around her. I kicked hard, and we rose like this, not joyfully, together.
Then the others came,
so fast
, as if they’d felt my grief move through the water: Idris, the closest one, already on the deck, taking her in his arms, lifting Helen away from me; Kristina waving furiously at the lifeguard, trying to make that flushed boy comprehend the wild silence of her language; then another guard, a girl with a whistle, blowing hard, a short, thick, red-headed girl with powerful thighs like one of those miniature gymnasts; and Louise Doren touching Helen’s feet, believing the one who’d almost died could heal the one not living.
The flustered boy yelled, commanding us to step back, me and Kristina, Louise and Samuel, as if we had no part in it, no place or purpose here, no desire—running now, the guards, telling Idris to set her down,
gently, gently;
scolding us with their voices, not the words themselves, but the tone, the inflection, the implication we’d done her harm, the insinuation our touch was violent.
They knelt beside her—the boy, the girl, these two, these children. The fierce little gymnast pumped Helen’s chest, and we saw her: Helen Kinderman exposed, pale skin blotched and blue, supple legs weirdly bloated.
Stop.
I wanted someone to stop this. But nothing stopped. In her chest, tiny bones cracked; from her mouth and nose, water spurted. Then the boy had his mouth on Helen’s mouth, and the girl pressed hard with the heels of her hands, and Helen’s bones broke and her body surrendered and there was hope the lungs might heave, the heart clench, the love of life return, the delicate pulse throb in her neck again.
Where was the manager?
Out back, smoking a cigarette?
On the phone, scolding her befuddled father?
What did it matter where or why, legitimate or foolish? She’d left us in the care of two teenagers who had done the drill ninety-nine times but never resuscitated an actual not-living, not-breathing person.
Too late, my fault, I’m the one, I saw her.
Or maybe it was Helen’s fault for swimming underwater so many times, for teaching me, Idris, the rippled boy, Samuel Killian, the buoyant woman—all of us— how strong she was, how ridiculous we were to worry. I wanted to rage at Helen, God, the manager.
Where are you now? What are you doing that’s more important?
Two firemen and a paramedic descended, dark birds in black jackets, fast and graceful, called by God, terribly efficient. Helen belonged to them now. They had paddles to jolt her heart and a syringe full of epinephrine. Her body rose and shuddered and stopped, and rose and shuddered and stopped, and rose and shuddered and stopped, and then these three raised her on their wheeled cot and took her away from us.
Gone, our beautiful girl, gone all the way over, already on the other shore—I knew it as soon as I touched her.
Now the jittery manager and her quick guards herded us to the locker rooms, told us not to shower.
Dress and go home. Pool closed for the day. Come back tomorrow.
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. violette sat in her chair, cap curled up like a crown, damp red towel like a cape around her. Crippled queen! I wanted to kneel before her.
We didn’t go home. We clustered outside, though the day had gone dark, though the wind whipped icy snow into dancing funnels. The pregnant woman sobbed, blaming herself.
I saw her
, she said.
I didn’t even try to go down.
She touched her huge belly.
I can’t. I’m too buoyant.
Then she laughed, a high yip that made her gasp until Idris put his arm around her.
She wanted to touch me because I’d touched Helen, because she thought I was good, because she believed I’d tried to save her.
I let her believe; I let them all believe what they wanted.
Carl looked in my direction, but his focus went far beyond, to the trees, to the snow on the mountains behind us. Louise and her two friends pressed up against me, and only then did I realize how weak I was, that I had almost fallen. I whispered,
She’d be alive if I’d gone sooner.
And Louise said,
It could have been me or Joan or Hannah. It could have been Kristina or Samuel or Violette.
She touched the place where her left breast once was to remind me: anyone can drown or save or fail.
Or you
, she said, you
might have been the one on the bottom, Idris the one who dove too late, Idris the one who waited.
She meant to be kind, but her words pierced me.
She drove me home. She unlocked my door.
The guards,
She said,
their job.
I nodded.
But we were there, with Helen, in the water.
I didn’t say it.
She wrote her phone number on a little scrap of paper.
Call me if you need something later.
I thought God was here, in this room, still alive but unable to help us, revealing Himself to me in Louise Doren. I couldn’t bear Him, His grief, His terrible need, pomegranates and grapes, three fat pears, a jar of black olives, all that fruit,
His
fruit, in my kitchen.
And then Louise closed my door, and I was alone, completely, and everything in the house scared me: fruit uncut, wine unopened, Mother’s white tablecloth rolled tight, Mother’s white-on-white scroll, the Tree of Life embroidered in satin stitches, a wedding gift from Datiel, her cousin, Mother’s blessed cloth, never once creased, never once folded.
I smelled Helen Kinderman in me—soot of adrenaline, burn of chlorine—we shared this: one scorched body. I wanted to wash her away, the smell, the memory, the thing that had happened but couldn’t be, and I tried to climb the stairs, but I was too weak to stand, too light in the head, and I was afraid of the water, my father there, dead of a heart attack at fifty-seven, Leonard Lok crumpled in the shower, alone, two hours—my father who might have survived if Mother had been home, if Mother had heard a cry, if he hadn’t hit his head so hard on the tile. Even now, today, he might live—if only I could climb the stairs, if only I could reach him.
How can this be?
My mother’s sister Edith died because she was too ripe, too beautiful, because her hazel eyes were almost gold, because she scared them. The doctors thought if they could sterilize a girl like this, they could sterilize anyone. Cut without anesthesia, burned with acid, she died barren, bearing only their secrets.
Any day you might be the one, or the one of a thousand chosen.
Because you resisted, because you stumbled, because one cell grew wild, because you spat blood, because you held your breath, because you chose to stay under.
For two hours the water ran cold over my father’s cold body.
You died because you were exceptionally kind; you lived because you were spectacularly cruel—because you were wise, because you were foolish—because you didn’t hide in time, because you didn’t believe, because you couldn’t imagine.
How can this be?
My mother said,
Our neighbors turned us out. Our good Christian friends delivered us to the soldiers. The midwife who brought me safe into the world probed me now, deep inside every opening, searching for stashed gold, luminous pearls, glittering rubies. My own mother wept, watching. “Please, she’s just a girl, be careful.” But Katarina’s fingers pushed hard. Katarina Szabó pierced me. As if I were nothing to her—goat, dog, Jew, stranger—as if my aunt Lilike had not baked the three-tiered wedding cake for Katarina’s daughter, as if my
mother had not sewn the white dress and stitched a hundred and twelve glass beads into the bodice.
How can this be?
The family jewels were inside, it’s true, but not in my body— four gold rings, wedding bands, all we’d ever had between us, four thin rings hidden deep in the belly of the doll my father brought me oh-so-long-ago from Budapest. Hidden: as if we would return, as if our house would be our house, the doll uncrushed, Mother’s china cups unshattered. Anastasia had porcelain teeth, a red tongue, tiny dimples; she looked ready to speak, thin pink lips lightly parted, the princess Anastasia sweetly smiling. I stared at her on the shelf, and all the while Katarina probed, red-tongued Anastasia kept her silence.